In
many Anglo-Argentine artist's works we find the fusion of semantic elements
from multiple cultures, geographically far apart. His research focuses mainly
on religion and, in particular, on the different representations of the deities
in the different beliefs.

In
the installation My God is your God the God who presents us Mauri is a figure
obtained by the union of the physical characteristics of Jesus, Shiva, and
Horus: three gods who have unexpectedly much in common, in the events and in
the biographies, from a original worship of the sun. Thus, as the artist
himself says, "(...) My God is your God is the exercise of imagining God as a flexible category, ancient and
modern at the same time."

To
assemble his Altars, the artist uses the popular merchandising products, creating
microsets where the deities are suspended in a world more kitsch than
metaphysical, but only because it inspired by currents votive images. God is
essentially a being that nobody has ever seen, but in which men believe. Thus,
the images that we have are only ideal representations.

This
same feature is characteristic of the aliens and Sebastiano Mauri tried to
imagine what would happen reversing the roles: in the series of sculptures Aliens,
extraterrestrials show their similar souvenirs from planet Earth and we
discover that, aside from appearance, behavior is not so different from us.

This
series seems to invite us to break down any prejudice against the Other, who is
alien, who has a culture, language, or different traits. If standardization
flattens us and gives no dignity to the individual, diversity, contrary,
enriches.

In
the video Immanence our mental flexibility is in a sense put to the test and, if you try
to draw some conclusions from the initial images, we will be proven wrong. This
video in fact, whose title refers to the Buddhist concept of
"immanence", which says that one soul can exist in two different
bodies, is composed of several fragments that "spy" moments of the
life of each of the protagonists: at the beginningthe artist presents them through a narrow first floor that
hides the context, and only later shows us what is really happening (see here
an extract from the video http://www.sebastianomauri.com/works_video.php?id=2).

Erich
Fromm wrote in To Have or to be: "The need of religion is rooted in the
fundamental conditions of existence of the human species", and again:
"The problem is not formulated with the question: religion or not?,
but only as: what kind of religion?".
The one of Mauri is definitely one of the less confrontational, collected in one
pantheistic prayer.

Sebastiano Mauri, an Italian-Argentine, was born in Milan in 1972, has lived and worked
for years in Milan, New York and Buenos Aires.

He
graduated from film school at New York University for his short films and has
won the Warner Brothers Award and the Martin Scorsese Post-Production Award. He
studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art and the Art Students League of New York.
Visual artist, his works have been exhibited in galleries and museums around
the world.